Real Monsters
Two empty bottles of cheap shoddy beer stood on the bar counter, right next to a cup with a finger's width of whiskey resting in it. Emily blew a strand of fire-red hair out of her face and, for no apparent reason, glared at the bartender as he collected and removed the empty glass containers from in front of her.
Over the course of the hour she had spent there, she slumped more and more over the bar counter where she sat. Every now and then, she glanced at the flat screen TV hanging over the bar, watching the news flashing across the screen with mild disinterest. The lights of cars on the city's street outside the bar's windows drearily passed by. The more she drank that night away, the more those lights outside turned into hazy blurs, contrasted by the soft illumination in this quaint pub.
Emily's willowy frame and symmetrical features would lead to anybody describing her as an attractive woman in her late twenties—if you could stomach the strong stench of cigarette smoke clinging to her like a dark miasma—so it was nothing unusual for her to have some guy sidle up next to her with a warm and friendly smile. He even did a decent job at holding back from cringing, once he inhaled some of the air in Emily's vicinity.
*
"Hey, I was just—"
"Fuck off," she told him without looking up from the glass of whiskey she was nursing, swirling the liquid inside her glass in one hand. She trained her eyes on the TV screen even though the lines and text on it were getting blurry for her.
The young man's face turned sour in an instant and he uttered a string of profanities at Emily while leaving her to herself, causing the bar stool next to him to scrape over the floor with a loud noise and prompt some other patrons to turn their heads.
The regular murmurs and conversations and clinking of glasses continued without incident though, as this sort of thing was a common scene in a bar like this.
Emily sighed when she saw a familiar segment rearing to come up on the TV. While some advertisements fired up with obnoxious lettering and white-washed imagery on the screen, she waved the bartender over.
"Can we change the channel? Isn't there, like, a fucking game on, or something?" she asked him, clearing her throat in between the sentence fragments, taking her voice from raspy to gravelly. She pointed her index finger past the glass of whiskey she was holding.
The bartender, seemingly nice enough all evening, slung a small towel over his shoulder and leaned in over the counter to her. He seemed to register her request with a bit of a delay, then forced himself to smile. He nodded, then pointed to someone at the opposite end of the counter.
"I'll get right on it after taking care of the gentleman over there," he said.
She watched him saunter over yonder, taking his sweet time. Stifling a groan with a sigh, Emily muttered to herself, "Happy fuckin' birthday to me, I guess."
Right about when the bartender returned to her end of the counter, the ads ended and the segment started. Some shaky, grainy pictures flashed across the screen, commented on by a lady with one of those perms that looked like it was made of plastic. The graphics heralded an exposé about human trafficking discovered on the Canadian border between Vancouver and Seattle.
With a rosy color flushing her pale cheeks, Emily emptied the glass and covered half her face with a hand as if to bury it there, though all she wanted to do was hide.
The bartender leaned down and grabbed something from behind the counter, then froze mid motion of aiming the remote control at the TV set. He blinked as he saw a red-haired reporter with a mean green-eyed glare on the screen—one who happened to look a lot like Emily. Or rather—exactly like her, if you could tell the change in outfits apart. His head went on swivel between the Emily at the bar and the Emily on screen until he lowered the remote and casually leaned against the counter.
"Holy shit, is that you? You some kinda reporter, huh?"
"Fuck," Emily hissed under her breath, managing to eke out a smile that refused to reach her eyes. She hunched even deeper over the counter towards the bartender and then hushed him with the words, "Yep, that's me, Sherlock. Let's not make a big deal out of it, 'kay? I'm trying to unwind tonight."
The bartender scanned her face with what was growing interest, but he turned to look back up at the screen again, giving her a curt nod in response.
"Gotcha," he whispered. Watching the footage fly through, inter-cut with pieces of interviews and Emily being followed by a shaky camera switched into night mode, the bartender still couldn't help but emit a short little whistle between his teeth.
"Damn, I'm not gonna turn the audio up, but that looks like some rough stuff," he said.
His features softened as he could spot Emily's mien darkening. He slid to lean over the counter and keep his voice down as he asked, "You okay? No offense, but you've been lookin' down in the dumps all evenin'."
"No offense, but whenever anybody starts anything with 'no offense', it's gonna offend, buddy," she said, glaring at him.
"Jeeze, okay, I get it. You're not here to talk. But I feel like I'd be an asshole for not asking," he said, absentmindedly scratching the fashionable stubble on his chin.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Brian."
Emily smirked and said, "Okay, Brian? You keep the drinks coming, we both mind our own business, and I'll make like a tree soon enough."
Something sparkled in Brian's eyes and he shook his head with a strange slowness. Emily struggled to read what it meant or where it was coming from. A couple of drinks earlier and she would have had him figured out easily, but the meds mixing with the booze were doing her signature skills no favor. Her gut instinct swung wildly between him either feeling pity or genuine care for a fellow human being.
"I do have some responsibility here. I wouldn't let you walk outta here knowing you had to drive after all the drinks you've been pounding down on, and I sure as hell am not gonna just pretend you can see that kinda—"
He cast a sidelong glance up at the TV screen, then continued, "That kinda shit doesn't just bounce off o' ya. Just seeing something like that on the news is enough to upset me. I can't even imagine what it's like to be there, and talk to the monsters who do shit like that. Or, y'know, the victims of those monsters."
The sparkle in his eyes turned wet, glistening with empathy. Brian was good, Emily thought.
"C'mon, humor me. I bet it'll be a load off o' your shoulders to talk about it. I hear plenty o' sob stories and have to pretend that they're oh-so-tragic, but even all that petty bullshit eventually gets to me."
Emily said nothing. Continued studying his face.
"Costs you sleep, leads to drinking to sleep more, which leads to—eh, you know where I'm going with this."
He shrugged and bit his lip, awaiting a response from her after all his rambling. The other people in the bar never turned silent, but the silence that welled up between Emily and Brian became so thick that you could have cut it with a knife.
"Okay," she said. She put the glass down and repeated herself with another smirk, this one far less convincing and with far less confidence than any other expression she had brandished that night. "Okay. Brian? You might wanna buckle up, because this is a wild ride. Fuck, I don't even know where to start. Much easier to write these things than to present them."
She shot a glance up at the TV, conveniently presenting one of the monsters Brian had unwittingly mentioned.
"See that schmuck right there? Married, three children, successful business owner, respected in his community, loves walkin' his dog in the park, probably tips generously, and also responsible for making twelve Vietnamese women live in a filthy fucking dungeon of a basement for ten years—forced into sex work, allowed out only to assemble and package counterfeit watches. Real piece o' shit, sub-human, scum-sucking trash with a heart so fucking rotten that it might as well be a black hole. And he wasn't even the mastermind or anything, he was basically middle management in this outfit of human-shaped turds."
Emily kept getting more worked up as she swore up a storm and recounted the discoveries from her research. Brian visibly swallowed a lump that had formed in his throat and she could tell he was only moments away from breaking out into a cold sweat just from hearing the fury in her account.
"Her name was Tran. These dirt-bags trafficked her across the ocean to America, together with other girls, in containers that must have reeked to the high heavens of human shit and piss, subsisting on nothing but scraps of rotten fucking food. She was separated from her 5-year-old kid when they took her after promising her a better life for her family, and then these rat bastards on our side of the drink tried to ferry her over the border to Vancouver with some others by sticking her in a fucking refrigerator truck where she froze to death behind some pallets stacked with meat. With fucking meat," she said with some spittle frothing on her lip. "Because that's all she was to these monsters."
Emily crammed a fist into her jacket pocket and produced a crumpled up pack of cheap cigarettes from it. She dumped it on the counter in front of her, together with a smartphone with a display so cracked that it would be close to impossible to read anything on it, and a plastic lighter clattering out onto the counter next to it.
"I don't even know if they deserve to be called monsters. Because a monster at least acts upon instinct, like a fucking animal. Eat, fuck, shit, sleep, rinse repeat. But these motherfuckers, I swear," she dug a cigarette out of the pack and swiftly lit it up.
Brian's face had long fallen into a twisted visage of disgust and despair, paralyzed and incapable of escaping her cutting monologue, and his speechlessness extended into his inability to tell Emily she wasn't allowed to smoke inside the pub. He feebly pointed at the cigarette she now took a long drag from and then rubbed his face instead.
With the force of frustration, she blew out some smoke before continuing her furious rant. She pointed at the TV screen with the burning cigarette clamped between her fingers. Some heads at the other end of the dive now turned to look at her again, the murmurs likely questioning what was going on there.
"They go home, they go shopping in a grocery store like you and me, they go to barbecue parties, they tuck their kids in at night, and they probably play poker or some shit. All the while they are quietly committing passionless murders; just cold calculated without any remorse. Enriching themselves with the suffering of the human beings they treat like fucking meat."
More smoke billowed out of her nostrils like a dragon breathing fire when she picked up again, not missing a beat, "By the time Tran was twenty-seven and they recovered her body from the back of that truck, the autopsy showed that all the slave labor and all sex work had given her permanent spine damage. So, she was in constant crippling pain for the final fuckin' years of her life before she died an undignified death without a single fucking soul to mourn her passing. And don't you fucking give me that bunch of rotten, disingenuous politicians farcically conveying their condolences while scampering around to cover up for anybody in the police or border control who were in on this whole operation before we popped the lid on the entire stinking cess pool. Allegedly," she said, letting the final word ooze out with bitter contempt.
Emily stopped herself, arched her head back and released an almost satisfied groan. It did feel good, at least somewhat. Sweet, sweet release.
She looked at Brian the bartender, now staring at her with eyes as wide as saucers, rendered speechless by her outburst of pent-up rage and verbal diarrhea that came from a festering disease that was what Emily's view of humanity had become.
Her heart raced, but the frayed ends of her nerves had stopped screaming. For now.
After taking a long drag from her cigarette and savoring the next cloud of smoke she exhaled, she dug around in her pocket to get out some cash, spilling it out onto the counter in form of crinkled dollar bills and coins and leaving a pathetic tip because that was all she had on her.
Her voice dropped in volume, "Thanks, Bri. Good talk."
She patted the money she was leaving on the counter and stood up straight. Or as straight as she could manage, because she drunkenly swayed a bit—which she elegantly masked with her years of drinking experience by slinging her jacket on.
One of the other patrons whose stare lingered on her for too long drew another deadly glare from Emily.
"The fuck are you lookin' at?" her words muffled as she kept the cigarette clamped in between her lips. His eyes widened and he lowered himself over his drink while the other people at his table went silent with him.
Brian stammered out something, but Emily was too wasted already to really make out the precise words, and too far gone for that night to give a damn. He was probably going to check in on her and see if she was alright, yet again. Bless his soul.
She pushed open the front door. The jingle of a bell overhead caused her to flinch when she staggered out into the drizzle of rain outside the bar and she let the door slam shut behind her. Emily popped the collar of her jacket and wandered off into the city's night.
After taking a final angry drag from her cigarette, she tossed the butt into a gutter and buried her hands in her jacket pockets while she stumbled on her way home, in the rough direction of her dingy downtown apartment.
She came upon a homeless guy sitting on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign right next to him, but the letters written on it blurred into something incomprehensible to Emily's drunken stare. He was wrapped up in layers of sweaters and jackets and had a hood up over his head, with some newspapers spread out on top to shield him from the rain. But the sheets of paper were turning dark quickly, soaking up the raindrops as they grew in size and frequency.
With the rustling of the newspapers, the homeless man looked up at her, but the darkness concealed most of his features beyond a gray beard and skin that looked like a roadmap of sunburnt wrinkles.
"You should get outta the rain, buddy, s'gonna be a downpour tonight," she told him.
He just stared at her. Shadows cloaked his eyes and a pit formed in Emily's stomach.
"I ain't got any change. Just pissed it all away just now. Sorry, man."
She tried to lock eyes with him, but found no eyes underneath that veil of darkness over his own. The lack of a reaction began to creep her out. She gave him a bowing nod and walked on with a clipped, "Night."
A few steps further down the sidewalk, she figured she might regret it, but considered inviting him home. The poor bastard might freeze to death on a late autumn night like this.
"When the world is a prison, there are those who are the prisoners cursed with unknowing, and the jailers who hold the keys to their unseen cells. Which are you?"
Those words rolled out with a fluid clarity and a gravity to rival the weight of the world. There was something about them—a sense of finality—that lent them a sinister air. They came from behind Emily—from that homeless man.
She turned slowly. Her heart raced, this time not with anger, but a growing sense of dread. She feared to see what this homeless man had turned into. His voice was as voluminous as that of a giant, as imposing as a king.
But there was nobody there. Emily looked around in disbelief. There was nobody else in this narrow street. The drizzle intensified until it turned into full-blown rain.
A cold shudder ran down her spine and Emily shivered. She suddenly remembered the pictures of Tran from the autopsy report, pale and lifeless, with eyes closed. An innocence destroyed by the monsters of this world. A horrible truth that Emily had helped unearth.
Emily went home and locked all three locks of her apartment door, shooing her three cats off her bed and crashing onto the covers without undressing.
The dark void of a dreamless sleep enveloped her within seconds and the next day, nothing would be the same, ever again.
This was the final night before her awakening.